


Kintsugi (Golden Journey)

by bouquetofwhoopsiedaisies



Series: Gold In The Cracks [1]
Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: AU, Gender-Neutral Pronouns for Pidge | Katie Holt, Hunk just wants to give him a hug, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Keith goes through some major shit the poor guy, M/M, Modern AU, One of those AUs where you can write on your hand and the mark appears on your soulmate's hand too, Pidge is aro-ace and agender, Queerplatonic Relationships, Soulmate AU, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, because it's an AU so I can do that, before he even knows who he is, but not shown explicitly, omg is that a pun... because Au and 金... I never noticed that lol
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-08
Updated: 2017-12-11
Packaged: 2019-01-31 02:12:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 20,091
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12666183
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bouquetofwhoopsiedaisies/pseuds/bouquetofwhoopsiedaisies
Summary: Lance is quiet for a few moments, fiddling with the bottle of nail polish in his hands.  He lets out a short, humorless laugh.  “I always thought this whole soulmate thing was supposed to make everything less complicated.”“I guess things don’t always work out the way they’re supposed to.”  Hunk says, thinking back on those years of finding bruises on his skin that never hurt, not on his end.(This is one of those AUs where you can write on your hand (or any part of the body) and whatever you write will appear in the same place on your soulmate.  For most people, that means they can quickly and easily jot a note to their soulmate or send them a lovely little heart on their hand or what have you.  Hunk, however, learns from a pretty young age that it isn't just pen ink that transfers)





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Kintsugi: the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with lacquer mixed with gold dust, treating breakage or damage as part of the history of an object rather than something to disguise.
> 
> (To make it easy to tell if something is just an italicized word or something a soulmate wrote, all soulmate messages are enclosed in Japanese single quotation marks , like「this」. Sorry if that's confusing, it made sense to me to keep it different from just italicized words, and the marks were right there on my keyboard anyway)

Hunk is seven years old when he learns about soulmates.  

He finds out when his father is at the grocery store while his mother is in the kitchen, cooking for the Christmas dinner they’ll be going to in a few hours at his grandmother’s house.  Hunk has been recruited to constantly stir a pot of caramel on the stove while his mother bustles around the kitchen making the other dishes.  He hears her root around in the refrigerator, then  _ tsk  _ softly.  

“Eggs.  I  _ knew  _ there was something I forgot to put on the list.”  She grabs a pen out of the jar next to the phone and starts to write on her hand in large letters.  The letters are so big that he can read it from where he stands perched on a step stool next to the stove: 「 _ please buy eggs _ .」  She caps the pen and places it back in the jar, then reaches into a cabinet and pulls a baking tray out, setting it on the countertop.  She looks down at the back of her hand and smiles fondly at the words there; Hunk can see a single word printed below the letters she had written a few moments ago, 「 _ okay _ 」, followed by a heart.  She nods to herself and turns on the sink, scrubbing away at the ink until it fades away.

He doesn’t realize he’s been staring until she looks over and says something.  “Honey, don’t forget to be stirring that caramel.”  

He startles and goes back to it, having to work a little harder because it had begun to solidify.  “What did you do?”  He asks.

“Hm?”  She doesn’t look up from lining the baking tray with wax paper.  

“Why did you write that on your hand?”  He asks again.

“Oh, that.  I just wanted to let your father know to buy eggs while he was out.  That’s the quickest way to get to him.”  She says, checking the temperature of the bubbling caramel with a candy thermometer.  She nods to herself and turns off the stove.

“But how does writing on your hand tell him?”  Hunk asks, confused.  

“Because he’s my soulmate.”  She says simply, pouring the sluggish liquid caramel into the baking pan to cool.  “Everyone can send their soulmate messages by writing them on their arm or hand.  Whatever marks you make on your skin will appear on the other person’s.”  

“Really?”  Hunk thinks that sounded like magic.  “Can I try it?”  

“Not right now.”  His mother says, checking her watch.  “Right now, I need your little hands to decorate some cookies to take to Grandma’s.  Think you can do that?”  

“Yeah!”  

It isn’t until later, when everything is baked and prepared and ready to be packed in the car, that Hunk thinks about her words again.  He’s in his room, changing out of his flour-smudged jeans and t-shirt and into a nice Christmas sweater and khakis, when he pauses to look at his bare arm, turning it over to examine the back and front.  If he wrote on his hand like his mother had, would his soulmate see it?  Would they write back?  

He opens up the drawer of his desk and pulls out a box of markers.  Picking through them, he considers what color to use and ultimately decides on red.  His favorite color is yellow, but that won’t show up on his skin, and he wants his soulmate to be able to see it.  Red is a nice color, too, plus this marker smells like strawberries.  He wonders if the smell will get to his soulmate too, or if only ink transferred.  Uncapping the pen, he poises the marker over his left hand and writes 「 _HI!_ 」 in big letters across the back of his hand, covering the entire expanse with those two letters.  He stares at it for several long moments, grinning excitedly.  His grin starts to fade when nothing happens.  He hears his mother call his name, and he quickly pulls on his Christmas sweater.  

His mother frowns at him when she sees him.  “Honey, what happened to your face?  Your cheek is all red… Did you hit it on something?”  

“Huh?”  He feels his cheek, wondering what she means.  Maybe he had accidentally gotten some of the red marker on his cheek?  But he didn’t remember that happening… Thinking about it, though, reminds him of his hand.  “Mommy, I wrote to my soulmate but they didn’t write anything back.”  He holds up his hand and shows her, pouting.  

She takes his hand and examines it.  “Maybe they’re busy and just can’t write back.”  She says, releasing his hand.  “Come on, get your shoes on.  We don’t want to be late.”  

He does so, and is in the middle of tying his shoes when he notices the letters on his hand smudge, grow fainter, and then disappear altogether, leaving behind slightly-pink skin.  

“It’s gone!”  He tells his mother, showing her his hand again.  She frowns; not looking angry, just mildly concerned.  

“They’re probably just busy, dear.”  She says again.  There’s a loud beep outside, coming from the car.  His father is waiting in the driveway.  Hunk quickly ties his other shoe and helps his mother carry the food and Christmas presents for his cousins outside.

Admittedly, Hunk forgets about the soulmate thing for a while.  Seven year-olds can get distracted fairly easily, and visiting with all of his relatives, playing with cousins he seldom gets to see, and all the Christmas festivities prove to be pretty good at capturing his attention.  

Another week has gone by before he goes to work on the coloring book he had gotten for Christmas and he remembers why his markers were already out, sitting on his desk, with the red one on top of the lid.  He uncaps the maker and pauses for a few moments, thinking.  Maybe his soulmate -- whoever they were -- didn’t like that he had written so big before.  Maybe he had startled them.  He supposes that writing that big was kind of like shouting, after all.  He writes again, in his best penmanship, the word  _ hello  _ along the top of the back of his hand, between his wrist and his pinky finger.  There was plenty of room below for his soulmate to write a reply.  

He stares at the back of his hand for a few minutes, waiting, but nothing happens.  Maybe they just haven’t seen it yet.  He takes out the rest of his markers and stretches out on the floor with his coloring book.  He pauses in his work periodically to check the back of his hand, but the only change comes about ten minutes later, when he looks at it only to find that the letters have again been scrubbed away.  

Maybe his soulmate didn’t like the color red, he decided, reaching for a green marker.  He writes 「 _ hello _ 」 again in the same place, then turns to color a tree green in his coloring book.  When he looks back a few minutes later, the word is gone from his skin.  He frowns and tries again, with the blue marker, only to get the same result.  He tries again, this time with purple, then orange, then yellow.  The yellow is faint against his darker skin, and he wonders if his soulmate will be able to see it.  Evidently, they can, because it too is erased from his skin within minutes, leaving him with just a slightly pink patch of skin where the letters have been scrubbed away over and over again.  

Hunk throws the last marker into the box angrily, his brow furrowed and a pout on his lips.  Why doesn’t his soulmate want to reply to him?  Has he done something wrong?  All he said was hello.  

Fine, he thinks to himself.  If they didn’t want to talk, then he wouldn’t talk to them.  

~~~~~

Over time, his resentment fades into forgetfulness, and he doesn’t often think about his soulmate.  Sometimes, he remembers, but then he also remembers that whoever it was had erased his messages.  Perhaps they really don’t want to talk to him.  That thought stings, a little, but his resentment turns into acceptance; he wouldn’t bother them, if that was what they really wanted.

A new family moves into the big empty house across the street.  They have a lot of kids, and one is even the same age as Hunk.  His name is Lance, and he is gangly and loud and always coming up with adventures for the two of them to go on.  They catch bugs, climb trees, build a secret fort together to hide from Lance’s younger siblings, and ride their bikes around the neighborhood.  Some of their more adventurous endeavors -- such as the time Lance talked him into letting him steer his wagon down the big hill near the park -- leave Hunk with grass-stains on his jeans and scraped-up knees.  His mother starts noticing bruises on his arms, and reminds him to be more careful.  Unfortunately, the word “careful” doesn’t seem to be in Lance’s vocabulary, not when there are trees to be climbed and woods to be explored, but luckily, Hunk doesn’t mind the few scrapes and bruises he gets.  Most of them don’t even hurt, and he can’t even remember where he got more than half of them.  They just seem to show up, unannounced.  He stops paying attention to them.

~~~~~

Hunk is ten and in the middle of a math test when the teacher pauses next to his desk, frowning down at him.  He stalls in the middle of writing an answer and erases it to start over, thinking that was what she was looking at.  If 3 times 5 isn’t 15, then what is it?  Funny, he really thought that was it.  

He counts in his head and writes 15 again.  Surely Mrs. Montgomery was just psyching him out.  She hasn’t moved, still frowning down at his desk, and he feels himself start to get nervous.  He double-checks his answers to the already-completed problems, wondering what it could be.  

Then, without any warning, she moves away, continuing to walk around the room and supervise the students.  Still wondering what it had been, Hunk quickly completes the rest of his multiplication test.  The teacher doesn’t stop next to any of the other students, leaving him confused about why she had with him.  

After math class is over, everyone is dismissed to go to recess.  Hunk talks with Lance about the math test as the two of them put on their coats; math is Lance’s worst subject, which isn’t very surprising, giving his boundless energy and loathing of sitting still.  

“Hunk, can I see you for a moment?”  Mrs. Montgomery tells him quietly.  He pauses in the middle of zipping up his coat.  

“Um.  Okay.”  He looks back at Lance, who shrugs, just as confused as him.  

“I’ll meet you by the swings.”  He says, and leaves with the rest of the class.  Hunk follows Mrs. Montgomery over to the reading rug in the corner.  She sits down cross-legged on the carpet, where she usually sits when she reads to the class.  Hunk sits in front of her, feeling a little odd being the only one there on the usually crowded rug.  

“How is everything going, dear?”  She asks, smiling.  The smile doesn’t quite touch her eyes, though.  It’s a strange look.  

“Fine.” He lets a question hang on the end of the word, unsure why she was asking.  

“How is everything at home?”  She asks.  “Your parents, do they get along?”

“Yeah.  Everything is fine.  Normal.”  He is confused by her questions.  “Did I do something wrong?”  

“No, no, of course not.”  She says.  “But, Hunk, does anyone ever… grab you?  Or be rough with you?”  

“No.”  He can’t recall that ever happening.  

“No?”  Her gaze drops for just a second, but it’s enough for him to see.  He looks down and notices what she must have been looking at during his test; four purple bruises laid in a line over his arm and another bruise wrapping all the way around his arm.  

“Oh.”

“How did you get that bruise, Hunk?”  She asked, her voice careful.  

Hunk frowns, trying to remember.  “I don’t know.”  He turns his arm over, studying it.  He had noticed it when he woke up one morning, but like the others, he hadn’t given it much thought.  “It might have been when-- um…”

“When…?” She prompts.  

He clams up.  “I’m not supposed to say.”

Something flashes across her face, quicker than he can catch.  “You can tell me, Hunk.  I won’t tell your parents.”  

He fidgets for a moment before breaking down.  He never really held up under pressure very well.  “Lance and I were exploring a drainage tunnel and he said there were spy dogs that lived under there and I didn’t believe him so he said to go see and I did but I got scared and chickened out and was coming back out when I tripped on a rock and fell.”  He wasn’t positive that was where he had gotten the bruise, but it was the only explanation he could think of.

Mrs. Montgomery blinks, clearly taken aback by his answer.  “You… what?”

“My mom said we shouldn’t go there but Lance talked me into it.  Please don’t tell my mom.  We won’t do it again.”  Hunk pleads.  

She looks uncertain.  “You’re sure that’s where you got that bruise?”  

“Uh-huh.” He nods.  Not one hundred percent, but it was likely.  He’s pretty sure it showed up around the same time, even though when he fell it was on the palm of his hand and his knee.  It was dark in there, though, and he was more than a little freaked out at the time.  It wouldn’t surprise him if he had fallen on his forearm and forgotten about it.  

She studies him a few more moments, then speaks up again.  “Alright.  Don’t go playing in drainage tunnels again.”  

“Yes ma’am.”  He nods resolutely.  “Can I go to recess now?”  She tells him that’s fine, and he rushes off to meet Lance by the swings, where he tells him he had gotten in trouble for trying to find the spy dogs.  As they were coming back in from recess, Mrs. Montgomery took Lance aside and asked him about the same event, and when she got a matching story from him, reminded him not to go playing in drainage tunnels again. 

~~~~~

Hunk is twelve when he find another strange bruise on his body that he doesn’t remember getting.  He notices that a lot, actually, but he is twelve when someone else noticed it too. 

He’s with Lance’s family at the community pool, sitting on the edge of of the pool with his feet in the water while Lance waits in line to go down the slide for the umptemth time.  Hunk had joined him for several trips down the side before he decided he was done -- he wasn’t a huge fan of the drop slide, preferring the twisty slide, but Lance declared that one for little kids and the drop slide for grown-up-kids like them -- and opted to take a break for a bit while Lance enjoyed the two seconds of adrenaline he got from the slide between waiting five minutes in line.  

Hunk is content to sit by the edge and just cool his feet off while letting the sun warm his shoulders and back.  It’s still warm out, but summer is fading and it’s not so hot that he feels the need to stay in the chilly water of the public pool.  Lance’s mother calls out to one of the younger children, and Lance’s youngest sister toddles over to the deck chair near where Hunk is sitting.  She takes off the girl’s water wings and dries her off before applying another layer of sunscreen.  

“Do you need more sunscreen, Hunk?”  She asks as she rubs some onto the girl’s scrunched-up face.  

“Maybe a little.”  Hunk walks back over to the chairs where their towels are and takes the proffered sunscreen.  It can’t hurt to be too careful.  He squirts a bit into his palm and rubs it over his cheeks, nose, and ears.  

Lance’s mother pauses in her work, eyeing him over the top of her sunglasses.  A frown pinches her mouth.  “Where did you get that bruise, hon?”  

Hunk looks at where she’s pointing and notices a mosaic of purple marks over his left ribs.  “Huh.  I don’t remember.”  

“Really?”  She closes her hand around her daughter’s wrist gently but firmly as the girl tries to squirm away.  “Stay still,  _ cariña _ .  You don’t want to end up with a sunburn.”  She rubs more of the sunscreen onto her shoulders, speaking to Hunk again.  “That looks painful, though.  You’re sure you don’t remember where you got it from?”  

“Nope.”  He reaches down and pokes at it gingerly, expecting it to hurt, but it doesn’t.  It feels totally normal.  “It doesn’t even hurt.  Must be healing.”  

“Must be.”  She muses.  She snaps the cap back on the sunscreen.  “ _ Ay _ , alright, you’re done.”  She tells her daughter, who gleefully pulls her water wings back on and runs away, her little feet making slapping noises against the wet concrete.  “No running!”  She shouts after her.  

Hunk chuckles as the little girl launches herself into the pool in a canonball.  He spots Lance climbing up the stairs to the slide again and decides to join him once more.  

~~~~~ 

Hunk is thirteen when the subject of soulmates comes up again.  

He and Lance are stretched out on their stomachs on the floor of Lance’s bedroom, working on homework.  Lance is filling out his science worksheet in glittery silver pen, even though Hunk told him the teacher probably wouldn’t like that because it was hard to read on the white paper.  Lance’s older sister Victoria pokes her head into the room, then narrows her eyes.  “Aha!”  

Lance jumps and scrambles to hide the pen behind himself.  “I don’t know what you’re talking about!”  He says loudly, and no one is convinced.  Victoria storms into his room and holds out her hand.

“Not buying it.  Hand it over.”  She curls her fingers, making a grabbing motion.  

Lance grumbles as he hands over the silver glitter pen.  “It’s not fair you get the cool pen.”

“I  _ bought  _ it with my own money, you ding-dong.”  She raps it against the top of his head lightly.  “It’s mine.”  

“You’re just showing off for Aaron…” Lance teased, drawing out the name.  “Gonna write him a love letter all over your hand?”  He finishes by making kissy noises.  Her cheeks color and she swoops in, pointing the pen dangerously close to his face. 

“You mind your own business.”  She tells him, then turns on her heel and leaves.  

Lance lets out a  _ hmph _ and grabs his pencil case, taking out a regular pen to finish the rest of his worksheet.  

“Who’s Aaron?”  Hunk asks, curious.  

Lance rolls his eyes.  “Victoria’s soulmate.  They’re always writing stuff to each other and being all lovey-dovey.  It’s gross.”  

“Do you have a soulmate?”  Hunk asks.

“Yeah.  Everyone does.”  Lance turns a page in his science book, looking for the answer to the next question.  

“Do you ever write to them?”  He asks.

“Sometimes.”  Lance says.  “They won’t tell me their name, though.  I don’t get why some people think it has to be a secret or something until you meet in person.  They won’t even tell me if they’re a boy or a girl.”  He frowns.  “I could be talking to some cute girl and not even know it!  All because some people like it to be a secret.  Secrets aren’t romantic, they’re dumb.”

“You’re just saying secrets are dumb because you’re not in on this one.”  Hunk said.  

“Well, duh.”  Lance said.  “But I do know one thing about them; they’re a total nerd.  They draw this one alien face all the time.  Almost like it’s their signature or something, since they won’t tell me their name.”  Both of them are quiet for a few minutes, each absorbed in their own thoughts.  Lance clears his throat.  “How about you?”

Hunk looks up.  “Huh?”

“Do you ever write things to your soulmate?”  Lance asked.

Hunk looks down at his hand.  He hasn’t tried, ever since he was little.  “I used to.  They kept washing the words off though.  They never replied.”  

Lance doesn’t know what to say to that.  “Maybe… maybe they just didn’t realize what it was.”

“It was pretty obvious.”  Hunk says quietly.  “I think they just don’t want me.”  

“Well then, they’re an idiot.”  Lance tells him.  “You’re a great person, and anyone would be lucky to have you as a soulmate.”  

Hunk lifts a shoulder in a half-hearted shrug.  “I wouldn’t really blame them.  There are plenty of way more attractive people than me out there.”  

Lance frowns at him and reaches over their books to lightly rap the eraser of his pencil on Hunk’s nose.  “You stop that.  You’re plenty attractive.  Plus, that can’t be the reason; they haven’t even seen you yet, so they can’t possibly be judging based on looks.”  

Hunk thinks about that.  “I guess you’ve got a point there.”  

Later, when he goes home that night, he takes out a pen and sits at his desk, thinking for several long moments before deciding what to write.  He is hesitant to start this message the same as the others, but feels like a general greeting would be the best way to begin.  He writes the word 「 _ hello _ 」 on the back of his hand and waits.  Sure enough, not even a full minute later, the letters smudge and fade away, as if whoever was on the other end was washing them away with water.  He feels a pang in his heart and tosses the pen back onto the desk, frustrated and hurt.  

Still a little angry and very confused, he grabs his pajamas and heads to the bathroom to have a shower.  Maybe he didn’t really need his soulmate, if they were that rude.  All he had said was hello; they didn’t have to wash it away so fast.  

He peels off his shirt and looks down to undo his belt when he notices a line of words written across his left hip, upside-down so he can read them.  「 _ Please don’t write on my hand.  It isn’t safe _ 」.  Hunk stares at the words, but this time they don’t fade.  Leaving his pajamas and shirt in the bathroom, he goes back to his room and grabs a pen.  He writes underneath the words that are already there.  「 _ What do you mean? _ 」

He waits, heart pounding, and expects the words to disappear again, but they don’t.  More appear, letter by letter.  

「 _ It just isn’t safe.  I don’t want to talk about it. _ 」 

Hunk doesn’t know what to make of that.  What could possibly be unsafe about a soulmate writing something on their hand?  While he’s thinking, another line of letters appears.  

「 _ If you have to write to me, do it here.  But it’s safer if we don’t talk. _ 」

Hunk worries his lip, concerned, and writes back, their conversation climbing up his waist.  「 _ Is there anything I can do to help? _ 」 __ He didn’t like what his soulmate was implying, that they were in a dangerous situation.  

The answer takes a longer time now, but when it comes, it’s just one word.  「 _ No _ .」

That word makes his heart hurt, and he isn’t entirely sure why.  He picks up the pen and writes again.  「 _ Can you tell me your name? _ 」 __

The letters come quickly this time, the person’s handwriting looking a little rushed.  「 _ I’m sorry.  I have to go _ .」  The words have barely been there a few seconds when they’re already being washed away before his very eyes, leaving only a faint smudge of ink behind like a shadow.  

Hunk sets the pen down, biting his lip.  He wants to write back, but he gets the feeling he shouldn’t.  A heavy, knotted weight settles in his gut at the thought of his soulmate being in danger somewhere.  

He doesn’t write to his soulmate again after that.  He’s tempted to, especially when he starts to notice more and more bruises on his own skin without ever recalling where he got them from.  It’s the middle of the school year and he’s older now; he and Lance don’t go on nearly as many adventures as they used to, so he doesn’t have a reason for finding random bruises on himself anymore.  It’s easy to get a few bruises here and there when you’re traipsing all over the woods and seeing how fast you can go down the hill with a wagon.  Much less so when you’re just playing video games or doing homework.  His heart pounds every time he finds a new bruise and he prods at them carefully with a finger.  A feeling of relief sweeps over him every time he feels a twinge of pain, because he knows it means the bruise is from his end and he must have bumped it against something.  A sinking feeling settles in his gut every time he feels nothing from them.  He wants them to hurt, he wishes more of them hurt; not because he likes pain, of course, but because he would rather the bruises come from his own clumsiness rather than coming from his soulmate.  

He begins to notice that the bruises aren’t in typical places, either; instead of being on the knees or elbows -- not unusual places to knock against a corner or table -- he finds them more on his ribs, in the middle of his arms or calves, even some on his neck.  Places that have no reason to be bruised, and certainly not in such strange shapes.  Sometimes he wraps his hand around his own arm or leg, fingers over the bruises that don’t hurt (not to him, at least), and finds that they fit nearly perfectly.  He feels sick when he realizes that a lot of the bruises had to have been inflicted by someone’s hand.  Hunk thinks back to third grade when his teacher had asked him about his family life after seeing the strange bruise on his arm, like a hand had been wrapped around it.  He understands where her concern came from, now.  

Anxiety twists a heavy knot in his gut every time he finds another bruise he doesn’t remember getting, and it only gets worse when he starts to find them in new places.  It takes him a minute to realize what he’s looking at when he finds a smattering of purple and blue on his hips and along the back of his thighs.  When the pieces click into place, he feels so sick that he’s afraid he might throw up.  He checks with his own hands, willing it to not be true, but they fit, purple smudges lining up with fingers, and he can see clearly where hands would have been, gripping hard enough to leave bruises in places that hands should never be, not on a child.  He wants to cry and hold this person in his arms and tear whoever did this to them limb from limb, but he can’t do anything at all.  He doesn’t even dare write to them, not even on the hip like they had before, because if bruises can be laid there, it likely isn’t safe to write there anymore.    


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (My formating got messed up and I don't know enough about hmtl to fix it... just pretend all the tildes (~~~~~) that are section breaks are in the middle, that's the only thing that's off. Sigh.)
> 
> If you're here for pidgance, this chapter has quite a bit of it. (There's, uh, kind of a catch, tho...)

Hunk is sixteen the next time he hears from his soulmate.  He sees the words again when he’s getting undressed to take a shower one evening, just like last time.  The letters are scrawled across his hip, looking like they had been written hastily by someone whose hand was shaking.  「 _ Call 911 _ 」.  Below it is an address.  His heart stutters for a moment and he nearly panics as he runs back to his room and grabs his cell phone off his desk.  He dials the emergency number and holds the phone up to his ear, heart pounding as the dial tone seems to stretch on for far too long.  He had no idea when those words had been written; it could have been hours ago, and he was only just seeing them now.  He might be too late.

The operator picks up and asks him what the emergency is.  He speaks quickly, the words tripping over each other in their desperation to get out.  “Someone at 57 West Stone Avenue, Galra Park, is in trouble.  I think they’re in danger.”

“How do you know about this?”  The operator asks.  

“I…” he hesitates; is ‘ _ my soulmate who I have never met wrote it on my hip _ ’ a reliable answer?  “I… I live nearby.  I heard something.  I don’t know what’s going on there but they’re in trouble.”

The operator is quiet for a few moments, and he can hear the tapping of a keyboard in the background before she speaks up again.  “A team has already been dispatched to that location, actually.  They arrived about ten minutes ago and have the situation contained.  Did you hear the gunshot?”

“Gunshot?”  A sudden coldness sweeps over him.  “Is anyone hurt?”  Was he too late?  

“I’m not at liberty to disclose that information.”  She says.  “If that is all, I need to take another call now.  Good night.”

Hunk hangs up the phone, feeling sick to his stomach.  What gunshot?  Was his soulmate okay?  They weren’t dead, were they?  Wouldn’t he have felt something, if that were the case?  

Heart pounding in his chest, he pulls on a shirt and grabs the keys to his mother’s car.  His parents are out at dinner with some friends tonight, so they aren’t around.  He doesn’t know if he should tell them, anyway.  It isn’t his secret to tell.  But, isn’t that what adults always told children?  That it was okay to tell an adult a secret if the secret involved someone being hurt?  He doesn’t know what to do, in this situation.  

He has to drive several towns away to get to the address written on his skin, and it takes nearly forty-five minutes to get there.  When he arrives, he finds a small house with an untidy, overgrown lawn, yellow police tape strung between the scraggly trees.  The house is dark, the outside only illuminated by the flashing blue and red lights of two police cars parked out front.  A couple of officers are talking to a woman in a fuzzy bathrobe and hair curlers near the mailbox at the end of the driveway, and she gestures at the house across the street as she talks.  Another officer wearing a bulletproof vest is coming out of the dark house, writing something down on a clipboard.  

Hunk jumps, startled, when someone knocks on his car window.  He sees another police officer standing there and rolls down the window.

“Can I help you?”  The officer asks.

“Is everything okay here?”  Hunk asked.  He knew very well that everything was not okay here, but he didn’t have any concrete information.  

The officer’s face remains carefully blank.  “We’ve got it under control, son.”

“Was anyone hurt?”  Hunk presses.  

“I’m afraid I can’t disclose that.”  The officer says firmly.  “I think you’d best not linger around.  Go on home.”  

Hunk does, mostly because he doesn’t know what else he can do.  He manages to make it back to his house before his parents get home from dinner.  Back upstairs in his room, he paces around thinking for several minutes before he decides to write something back.  With a pen under the message on his hip, he writes back.  「 _ The police wouldn’t tell me anything.  Are you okay? _ 」 __

He doesn’t get a reply, but the words also stay there, unerased.  They fade, gradually, over the course of a week, showing that they weren’t being washed away like before but simply left there.  He doesn’t know if this is a good thing or not.  What if the person really had died, and his words were just appearing unseen on a corpse’s skin, already buried in the ground?  It’s a horrible thought, and one that haunts him at night, but he doesn’t know what he can do besides wait.

When he wakes up the morning after that fateful night, the first thing he notices is some pretty heavy bruising on his ribs and his right arm, and even some finger-shaped splotches around his neck.  He takes to wearing jackets he can zip all the way up and keep the collar popped up to hide the marks, not wanting anyone to think he was in danger himself.  The last thing he wants is for his parents to wrongly be accused of hurting him.  The bruises fade in a matter of weeks, but he doesn’t write anything more, too worried about the consequences for the other person.  

~~~~~

It’s another six months until he hears from his soulmate again, and the sight of the words on his hip one night makes his heart leap in joy and relief before sinking again as he reads them.  This time, it’s just two words: 「 _ I’m sorry _ 」

He writes back quickly.  「 _ Are you okay? _ 」  He is surprised when more letters begin to appear; he had half-expected the person to keep quiet again.

「 _ I’m… okay now.  My arm was in a cast, so I couldn’t write _ 」 __ There’s a pause, then more letters appear beneath that.  「 _ Thank you for calling the police _ 」

Hunk wasn’t entirely sure it had been him that had first alerted the police.  He feels guilt settle heavily in his stomach as he thinks back to the events of that night, how he hadn’t seen the message until that evening.  「 _ What happened? _ 」  

There’s a long pause, and Hunk is afraid they might just erase the messages and leave, but eventually words appear.  「 _ I don’t want to talk about it.  I’m sorry _ 」

Hunk feels his heart break and he wants more than anything to hold this faceless, nameless, hurting person in his arms, and protect them from a danger he doesn’t even fully understand.  He can’t do anything, though, and he has never felt so helpless.  「 _ Are you somewhere safe, now? _ 」 __

「 _ I think so _ 」 __

He doesn’t know what to say to that, and whoever is on the other end doesn’t seem inclined to talk anymore.  The ink fades slowly again, smudging and growing fainter every day, but he could tell the messages weren’t being deliberately washed away.  He still doesn’t know if it’s safe to write to them again, so he holds himself back.  The last thing he wants is for them to be put in danger again.  

The only relief he gets is that there have hardly been any more bruises since that night.  Just a couple small ones here and there, and always on a knee or an elbow or an ankle bone; no more hand-shaped purple stains on his arm or neck, no more purple and red mosaics across his ribs or stomach or hips.  Just little bumps that seem to come from clumsiness rather than malice.  

~~~~~

Hunk is seventeen and finishing up his junior year of high school when a new student shows up in his homeroom.  The kid is quiet, eyes peeking out from behind overgrown black hair, and looks like he would like nothing more than to just fade quietly into the background.  The homeroom teacher isn’t having any of that, though, and makes him stand up in front of the class and introduce himself.  

“My name is Keith.”  The kid says, his voice quiet.  He says nothing else, and there’s an uncomfortable minute of silence before the teacher prompts him with another question.

“Where are you from, Keith?”  

“A lot of places.  I’ve moved around a lot.”  He looks down, and his cryptic answer prompts twittering among the students, who all turn to whisper to each other.

Once it’s clear that she can’t wring any more information out of him, the homeroom teacher tells him he can sit down.  He drops into the open seat in front of Hunk wordlessly and takes out a notebook.  

Keith turns out to be in a few more of his morning classes.  He visibly struggles with the lessons, and Hunk doesn’t blame him; they’re only three weeks from the end of the school year, and all the teachers are getting ready for their final exams.  It’s a terrible time to transfer schools.  

He spots Keith walking uncertainly through hallway G while he is on his way to lunch and waves at him.  “Hey,” he smiles.  “Are you looking for the cafeteria?”  

Keith jumps a little, looking startled, and glances down at the brown paper bag in his hands.  “Um, yeah.”  

“You’re in the right place, just going the wrong way.”  Hunk tells him.  “It’s at the end of this hallway.  Follow me.”

Keith nods and falls into step beside him. 

“My name is Hunk, by the way.  I noticed you were in my homeroom this morning.” He says, knowing Keith must surely have a lot of new names and faces to remember today.  “Do you have anyone to eat lunch with yet?”  Hunk asks as they get closer to the cafeteria.  Keith shakes his head wordlessly.  Hunk gives him a warm smile.  “You can sit with me if you want.  I’ll introduce you to my friends.”  

“O-okay.”  Keith still sounds hesitant, like he isn’t quite sure what to make of the offer.  Hunk chalks it up to being first-day-at-a-new-school jitters.  

Hunk leads the way to the table he usually sits at and introduces Keith to Lance and Pidge, an agender computer-whiz who he and Lance had become friends with when they met freshman year.  Lance had nearly singed Pidge’s eyebrows off with a bunsen burner mishap in science class, Pidge had thrown one of the crayons they were supposed to be melting at his head… and somehow the two had been thick as thieves by the end of class.  Hunk wasn’t entirely sure how it had happened, having been in a different class at the time, but he liked Pidge well enough that they were a welcome addition to his circle of friends.

“How come you’re transferring in now?”  Lance asks Keith, taking a bite of his sandwich.  “We’ve got, like, three weeks of school left!”

Keith just shrugs.  “It’s not like it was up to me.”  

“Is one of your parents in the military?”  Pidge asks.  

Keith looks confused.  “No?”  

“Just asking.”  Pidge says.  “My uncle is, and they move around a lot.  My cousin had just been chosen to be valedictorian of her class her senior year when my uncle got stationed in Germany, so that really sucked for her to have to move.”  

“Ouch.  That would be rough.”  Hunk winces.  

“If it’s not that, then what is it?”  Lance presses. 

Keith’s eyes flick up to meet Lance’s and he looks angry.  “None of your business, that’s what.”  He snaps.

“Yeesh, take a chill pill.”  Lance holds up his hands.  

“Hey, Keith,” they hear a voice speak up and turn around to find Shiro, a senior, standing behind them.  “Glad to see you found some people to eat with.”

Keith says nothing and just looks down at his sandwich, his ears turning pink.

“I’ll meet you by your locker after school to show you where our bus is, okay?”  Shiro says.

“I can find it myself.”  Keith says.  

“Probably, but my mom would have my head if I didn’t at least offer.”  Shiro says.  “I’ll meet you after school.”

“Got it.”  Keith bites the words out, refusing to look up.  Shiro doesn’t seem fazed, and just gives a friendly smile and a little wave as he walks off.

Once Shiro is out of earshot, Lance raises an eyebrow.  “Dude, what’s up with you?”  

“Nothing.”  Keith snaps.  

“Don’t you ‘nothing’ me,” Lance says.  “How the hell did you manage to get Shiro -- arguably the most popular guy in school -- to show you to your bus stop?”  

“It’s not like I asked him to.”  Keith tells him.

“And what was that about his mom telling him to?”  Lance presses.  “How do you know Shiro’s mom?”  

Keith’s head snaps up and he glares at Lance.  “They’re fostering me, okay?  Now will you drop it?”  

Lance blinks, clearly taken aback by the answer.  “Oh.”  

An uncomfortable silence settles over the group for a few minutes, until Hunk clears his throat.  “So, Keith, which do you like better, cats or dogs?”  He’s hoping that the easy icebreaker question might diffuse the tension that has fallen over the group.  Keith seems to relax just a little bit at the change in topic.  

“Cats, I guess.”  He shrugs.  “I’ve never had either.”  

“Cats are pretty good.”  Hunk agrees.  “I like both, but cats are more easy-going.”

“I think you mean ‘less fun’,” Lance pipes up.  “Cats are boring.  Dogs are way more fun.”

“I love dogs.  Guinea pigs are the best pets, though.”  Pidge says matter-of-factly.  

Lance makes a face.  “Ew, no, they’re like little rats without tails.  And their eyes are so beady…”

Pidge looks personally offended.  “We can no longer be friends.”  

Hunk chuckles at their banter, and the conversation manages to remain light-hearted for the rest of the lunch period.  Keith doesn’t contribute much, but he seems more relaxed now that the spotlight isn’t on him anymore, and Hunk gets the feeling he was just shy.    

~~~~~

Hunk is about a month away from his eighteenth birthday the next time the subject of soulmates comes up.  

Since he had gotten there, Keith has become an integrated part of his circle of friends.  They help him cram for the final exams that take place just weeks after he transferred, and then invite him to hang out with them all summer.  Keith slowly starts coming out of his shell more and more as time goes on.  He and Lance form an odd rivalry with each other, always trying to one-up the other for even the smallest things.  He and Pidge bond over their shared love of aliens, cryptids, and conspiracy theories.  He is the only one to laugh at Hunk’s terrible puns; while Lance and Pidge just groan at them, Hunk can usually catch Keith hiding a grin behind his hand or sometimes even laughing outright, the sound devolving into snorts that Hunk finds adorable and Lance teases him about, which usually launches Keith into another argument with him.  

When they start their senior year, they’re all glad to find out that they have all ended up in the same lunch period as each other, which means that lunch is generally a very fun time of the day, and a nice break from the stress that come with applying for colleges and doing the piles of work teachers are assigning in order to combat a growing sense of senior-itis among their class.  

One day, though, Hunk and Keith turn up to lunch to find Lance leaning on the table with his lunch untouched beside him, a moody pout on his lips as he works on coloring the entirety of the back of his hand with a blue pen.

“What’cha up to, man?”  Hunk asks, sitting down across from Lance.  

“Brooding.”  Lance pouts and runs the felt-tipped pen around a knuckle.  Part of Hunk chuckles internally.  At least he was honest about it.  

“I can see that.”  Hunk says.  “What about?”  

Lance sighs.  “My soulmate won’t talk to me.  They’ve been ignoring me for the past few days.”

“What did you do to piss them off?”  Keith asks, taking a bite of his sandwich.  

“Nothing!”  Lance looks frustrated.  “All I did was suggest we meet up, or skype at least.  I still haven’t even  _ met  _ them, because every time I bring it up, they go all MIA on me!”  

Pidge suddenly stalks into the cafeteria, a bad mood practically rolling off of them in waves.  They drop into their usual seat next to Lance, looking irritated.  Lance doesn’t look up from coloring his hand.  Pidge glares at him.  “You’re going to get ink poisoning.”  They tell him, their voice uncharacteristically harsh.  “Stop that.” 

“You’re not my mom.”  Lance snaps.  Pidge bristles, eyes flashing dangerously, and he quickly corrects himself.  “Or dad.  Or parent.”

Pidge glares at him for another few moments before turning away.  They open their lunch box with one hand and take out a sandwich, struggling to unwrap it for a few seconds.  Hunk pauses in the middle of a bite.  

“Pidge?  Is your hand okay?”  He asks.

“It’s fine.”  Pidge bites out. 

“You sure?”  They seem to be favoring it, curling their arm around their own waist and holding the sleeve of their sweatshirt pulled over their hand.  

“It’s  _ fine _ .”  Pidge snaps.  “I hit it in gym class, that’s all.”  

“Can I look at it?  Did you go to the nurse?”  Hunk asks.

“No and no.”  Pidge shoots a glare at him.  

“Jeez, what crawled up your butt and died?”  Lance puts his pen down and turns to them.  “If you hurt your hand, you really should go to the nurse.  What if you broke it?”  

“I didn’t break it, just leave me alone.”  Pidge scoots away from him, but Lance’s arms are longer and he manages to wrestle their arm away from their body.  He tugs their sweatshirt sleeve down, and at first, Hunk thinks their hand is just horrifically bruised.  It takes him a moment to realize that their hand is just covered in blue ink, the same as Lance’s.  

No one moves or speaks for a few moments.  The chatter of the other students around them feels unreal and separate compared to the stunned silence that has fallen over their little group.

“Pidge…” Lance’s voice comes out quiet.  Pidge yanks their hand out of his and pulls their sleeve back over their hand.  

“I don’t want to talk about it.”  They look like they’re on the verge of crying.  They throw their sandwich into their lunch-box and stand up quickly, rushing away before Lance can grab their arm and stop them.  

“Pidge!”  Lance gets up and runs after them, leaving his lunch on the table.  

Hunk and Keith sit in silence for a little while, both stunned by what had just happened.  Hunk reaches across the table and picks up Lance’s abandoned pen.  Keith tenses at the action.  “What are you doing?”  

“Just caping his pen.”  Hunk replies, doing so and setting the pen next to Lance’s lunch-box.  He looks at Keith.  “Why?”  

Keith shrugs, looking away.  “I don’t know.  Thought you might start writing to your soulmate too or something.”  

His words remind Hunk that he hasn’t talked to his own soulmate in a couple of years.  He looks down at his lunch.  “I don’t think mine likes me very much.  They don’t usually write to me.”  He pauses, then glances at Keith.  “How about you?”

Keith hesitates, then shakes his head.  “We’ve only written a couple of times.”  He says quietly.  

Hunk sighs.  “It doesn’t make sense.  Why do some people dislike it so much?”  His own soulmate, Pidge, Keith’s soulmate… what did they see in this that made them not want to communicate with them?

“Maybe there are parts of them that they don’t want to share.”  Keith said softly.  “Think about it: it isn’t fair, that every time you get hurt, the mark appears on someone else too.”

Hunk swallows as he thinks about all the bruises he had in the past, bruises without pain (for him, at least), that came from hands that should have been gentle but instead came down hard upon his soulmate.  “But… that’s not what it’s supposed to be for.”  He realizes.  “It’s supposed to be for writing messages to each other.  Drawing a heart or leaving a thoughtful note to let them know they’re loved, that kind of thing.”

Keith snorts quietly.  “Since when do things ever happen the way they’re supposed to?”  He asks, his voice oddly hollow.  

They don’t speak much for the remainder of the period, each absorbed in their own thoughts.  Lance and Pidge don’t come back by the time the bell rings, so Hunk picks up Lance’s lunch-box along with his own and brings it to his next class, since Lance is in that class with him.  He’s just wondering if Lance will even come to class when his friend suddenly skids into the classroom just as the bell rings.  He’s silent as he drops into the seat next to Hunk, who passes him his uneaten lunch.  There’s a faint blue tint to the back of his left hand, the ink having been mostly washed off.  

“You okay?”  Hunk asks quietly as class starts.  

“Fine.”  Lance says, but he doesn’t look it.  His eyes are red and his shoulders are slumped, like there is a great weight resting on him.  He’s quiet throughout the rest of class, but barely takes any notes, preferring to just doodle aimless shapes in the margins of his notebook.  Hunk recognizes the alien face he keeps drawing, the one he learned from talking with his soulmate, sketched repeatedly between curling waves and 3D cubes and hearts with jagged lines drawn through the middle.  

When the bell rings, they gather their books and stand up with the rest of the students.  Hunk touches his arm, silently asking, but Lance shakes his head.  “I’ll tell you in study hall.”  He says.  Hunk nods and lets him be.  They go their separate ways and don’t see each other again until last period, when they both have study hall together.  They snag a quiet table in the back corner of the library and take out their books.  Hunk doesn’t push him, knowing Lance will talk when he’s ready to.

Lance spins his pencil between his fingers, physics worksheet laying ignored in front of him.  “Pidge is aro-ace.”  He says finally, his voice quiet.  Hunk looks up.  Lance sighs.  “And I’m not saying that’s a problem -- I’m really not.  But they seem to think it is.  They were really torn up about it, kept saying I deserved better.  I don’t want better.  I just… I want to be able to be in their life in whatever way they’ll have me.  The last thing I want is for this to mean they stop talking to me.  I mean, I’ve kind of always envisioned having a regular romantic relationship with someone one day, but… honestly, I’d be happy just staying friends with them.  Does that make any sense?”  

Hunk thinks about it and nods.  “Yeah.  Your soulmate doesn’t necessarily have to be a lover.  And platonic love isn’t any less important than romantic love.”

The pencil slips from Lance’s fingers and rolls across the table.  He doesn’t bother picking it up again.  “That’s a good way of putting it.  I tried getting that across, but the words kept coming out wrong and I ended up making them upset… we’re going to talk more after school, though.  Hopefully it won’t blow up again.”  He lets out a heavy sigh and drops his head into his hands.  “They started crying, and that made  _ me  _ start crying -- god, Hunk, I’ve never seen them cry before and I never want to see it again, it broke my heart -- and it just turned into a huge mess.  Nothing ended up getting resolved.  They probably hate me now.”  

“I don’t think they hate you.”  Hunk said gently.  “It’s pretty hard to hate you, Lance.  The only person I’ve ever seen successfully pull it off was our sixth grade science teacher Ms Haggar and I’m pretty sure she was actually a witch.” 

Lance manages a dry chuckle at that.  “Thanks, man.”  

“And I copied my history notes for you, since you seemed a little out of it in class.”  Hunk says, sliding a couple sheets of notebook paper over to him.  Lance blinks.  

“You’re a lifesaver, Hunk, really.”  He gives him a wobbly smile.

“No problem.”  Hunk smiles.  “I really hope you guys manage to work it out.” 

“I hope so too,” Lance says quietly. 

~~~~~

Hunk isn’t really surprised when his phone rings a few hours after school and he sees Lance’s picture on his screen.  “Hey, how’d it go?”  He asks when he picks up the call.  

“I need some bro-time.”  Lance sounds tired.  

“I made cookies.”  Hunk tells him, propping the phone between his ear and his shoulder while he takes the aforementioned cookies out of the oven.  “Get your butt over here.”  

“Can I bring my nail stuff?”   Lance asks.

“Go for it, dude.”  Hunk says.  

Five minutes later, the two of them are sprawled out on the floor of Hunk’s bedroom, a plate of cookies next to their backpacks and Hunk’s foot in Lance’s lap, a couple bottles of nail polish nearby.  Lance doesn’t tell him everything, but he gives him the highlights of the conversation with Pidge while he files and paints his toenails.  It’s theraputic, something Lance tends to do when he gets stressed, like Hunk’s baking habits.  Hunk long ago stopped questioning it.  

“Basically, in the end, we agreed that we still want to be friends with each other.”  Lance says after he’s given Hunk the rundown of what they talked about, carefully brushing pastel-green paint onto Hunk’s big toe.  Green’s not his best color, and certainly not that shade, but Hunk doesn’t say anything about it.  He can tell Lance has Pidge on the mind.  

“Are you okay with that?”  Hunk asks.

“I mean, compared to what I was afraid of happening -- them cutting me out of their life -- yeah, I’m okay with it.”  Lance picks up his other foot and starts on that one.  “Honestly, it might be kind of hard to see them every day and know that we can’t have anything more than that, but weirdly enough, at the same time, I feel… at peace with that?  I don’t really get it.”  

“You just want to be a part of their life.”  Hunk says knowingly.  

“Exactly.”  Lance screws the top back on the nail polish bottle.  He leans back on his hands and takes a cookie from the plate while he waits for the paint to dry more.  “So what about you?  Have you tried to write to your soulmate at all?  I remember years ago you were worried about that.”

“We’ve talked, just a couple of times.”  Hunk admits.  “From what I can tell, they’re not… in the best situation.  But I don’t really know anything for certain, and they won’t tell me what it is.”   

“What do you mean?”  Lance tilts his head, brow furrowing.  

“Do you remember all those bruises I used to get as a child?”  Hunk asks.

“Yeah, your mom kept low-key blaming me for them, said we’d been roughhousing or something.”  

“It turns out they… weren’t from me.”  Hunk says quietly.  “Apparently it isn’t just pen ink that shows up on your soulmate’s skin.  Injuries too.”  

“Shit.”  Lance is quiet for a few minutes.  “Is there anything you can do for them?”  

“Not really.”  Hunk sighs.  “They won’t tell me what it is that’s going on, or even what their name is.”  He has the address of the house that he had called the police about that one night when he was sixteen, and he had even driven by there a few days later to check on it, but the house looked empty.  A couple of weeks later, there was a ‘for sale’ sign out front of it.  A young family with a baby and a dog moved in a few months later, as he saw the last time he had driven by.  He goes on.  “The only thing I could do for years was to just not write to them.  They said that helped, that it was safer, even though they wouldn’t explain why.  So for years that’s all I did.”

Lance caught on to the past-tense wording.  “And then?”  

“Then the bruises stopped showing up.”  He shrugs.  “I asked if they were okay -- on my hip, so it was easier for them to hide it -- and they said they thought so.  We haven’t really talked since, though.”  

“Maybe they got out of that situation, whatever it was.”  Lance says.  

“I really hope so.”  Hunk says quietly.  

Lance is quiet for a few moments, fiddling with the bottle of nail polish in his hands.  He lets out a short, humorless laugh.  “I always thought this whole soulmate thing was supposed to make everything less complicated.”

“I guess things don’t always work out the way they’re supposed to.”  Hunk says, remembering Keith saying something similar in the cafeteria.  

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I don't think I've ever seen any aromantic characters in soulmate AUs, ever. Maybe once where they're brushed off as "oh, some people don't have soulmates". And I don't like that. Platonic soulmates can be a thing, and they're not any less important than romantic soulmates. I'm actually working on a side-story for pidgance that covers their conversation (actually I've got a couple of side-stories for them... *sweats*). This is absolutely NOT a story where the aro character ends up in a romantic relationship just because they have a soulmate; this (and to a greater extent, the side-stories I've got in my WIPs) is a story about how platonic love is just as important as romantic love, because gdi, IT IS. 
> 
> On the other hand, Hunk and Keith are your more conventional romantic soulmates. They just don't know it yet. (le gasp, spoilers! jk jk you all saw the tags)


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I was supposed to get this up Wednesday but irl shit happened, sorry 'bout that.

After the initial argument that had happened the day Lance and Pidge found out they were soulmates -- actually, just Lance found out, as Pidge admitted they had already figured it out back when they saw him doodling their signature alien face in the corner of his notebook, and had kept quiet about it because they didn’t want it to hurt their friendship -- everything seems to go back to normal.  The two of them being soulmates doesn’t cause any friction between them or dampen their friendship.  If anything, the two of them seem to be growing a little closer, their friendship deepening without ever crossing over into the “more than friends” zone that Pidge had been worried about.  It turns out to not be as difficult as Lance had feared; the two of them were like two puzzle pieces whose edges had always been laying on top of each other, ready to click into place with just a light tap.  Hunk notices that they do seem to gravitate toward each other when they are all hanging out as a group, sitting next to each other on the couch or on the same side of the table at lunch, but now that he thinks about it, he realizes that they have always been doing that.  

The second half of senior year is a weird time.  On the one hand, half of Hunk’s teachers are really cracking down on assignments and grades, threatening that “things will be much harder in college, I’m just preparing you for the real world…”  The other half of his teachers seem to have the same senioritis feeling that their students have and are content to just pop a semi-educational video in for the class period.  Juniors come to school with dark circles under their eyes and haggle with seniors for their old ACT prep books, trying to buy them at a lower price than the school sells them for.  The stress of the first semester -- all the letters of recommendation and applying to colleges and waiting to hear back from schools -- is finally over for the seniors, and they find they have relatively little to do besides fill out some paperwork for the schools they have decided on and make sure they don’t suddenly fail in the last few weeks before graduation.

Hunk has decided to go to Altea University, as has Lance.  A decent chunk of students from their school usually go there, since it is close and has pretty good programs.  Hunk and Lance have both made off-handed comments for years about the inevitability that they would end up as roommates in college, so when the Altea U housing form comes in the mail, Hunk doesn’t think twice about asking Lance.  Lance, however, apparently has thought twice about it.

“I’m really sorry, man,” Lance rubs the back of his neck and avoids his eyes.  “I, well… me and Pidge have kinda been talking about being roommates.”  

“Oh.”  Hunk says.  “Are you guys… a thing now?  Like, officially?”

“Kind of?  We’re sort of playing it by ear.”  Lance admits.  “Pidge doesn’t want to call it dating, and to be honest it’s pretty different from how I envisioned dating; no hand-holding or kissing or stuff like that.  We just hang out.  They’ve said they’re open to the idea of a queer-platonic-partnership -- we’re still looking into that -- but they’re adamant about keeping it open in case I ever want someone else to ‘fulfill my needs’ or whatever, even though that’s not going to happen because they really are the only one for me…”  He trails off, shaking his head.  “Sorry, that kind of got away from me.  I guess the answer is: it’s complicated, but kind of.”  He holds up his hands in a shrug.  “But we’re thinking we might want to live together.  Sorry for bailing on you.”

“No, no, that’s fine.  You do you.”  Hunk says.  “I mean, I don’t have a problem with that, but… are you, you know, allowed to do that?”  Although they were agender, Pidge’s legal documents had them registered as female, and he was pretty sure even the co-ed dorms on campus required roommates to be the same official sex.  

“We can if we get an apartment off-campus,” Lance says.  “And that actually works out better, since apartments are cheaper than living in any of the dorms.  My parents have a lot of kids to get through college, so I’m trying to cut costs wherever I can.”

“That makes sense.”  Hunk nods thoughtfully.  “Well, if you live off campus, you’ll likely have a kitchen, so I’m officially commandeering your oven whenever I want to bake.”

“Oh, be my guest,” Lance smiles, relieved that he took the news so easily.  “But there will be a cookie tax for using my kitchen.  At least one cookie per batch must be sampled by yours truly.”  

“Dude, you know I give you way more than one per batch for free.”  Hunk chuckles.

~~~~~

With Lance out, Hunk suddenly finds himself needing to search for a roommate.  He can probably get away with checking the ‘random roommate’ option and being assigned someone to live with, since he is pretty easy-going, but he thinks it would be more fun to live with someone he already knows.  He’s still mulling it over when he gets to history class later that day.  His history teacher is one of the few who is determined to not let her students succumb to senioritis in the last few months of school, so they’re stuck doing research projects on various World War II atrocities.  Because that seems like a great way to close out their senior year.  At least it’s a partner project, and Hunk is partners with Keith.  

Despite not knowing each other for as long as Hunk and Lance had, Hunk and Keith seemed to just click, and they had quickly formed a quiet bond with each other.  Keith was absolutely terrible at math, so back when he had first transferred to their school right before finals, Hunk had tutored him a lot.  The study sessions at his house, while often frequently featuring Keith practically banging his head against the textbook in frustration, had actually been quite enjoyable.  They almost had a sense of what the other was thinking, which Hunk attributed to his own talent of being able to read people so well (somehow, though, it was easier with Keith).  He could tell when Keith was starting to understand something or when he was completely lost, or when they ought to take a break or get a snack and come back to something later.  Outside of study sessions, the two of them tended to sit next to each other when they were able to and seemed to gravitate towards each other, which Hunk assumed to be a reaction to Lance and Pidge doing the same.  He genuinely enjoys Keith’s company; it’s quiet and easy, and he likes making Keith laugh and seeing how much he has come out of his shell the past year.  

Hunk looks up from the book he’s supposed to be reading.  Keith is across the library table from him, pencil poised over a notebook and frowning at his own book, a grimace twisting his lips into a grimace as he reads about the Nanking Massacre.  

“Hey,” Hunk whispers, mindful of the teacher patrolling to make sure they’re all working.  Keith blinks and looks up, humming questioningly.  “What are you doing after you graduate?”

Keith looks down again, expression cloudy.  “Going to Altea U.”  

Hunk blinks; he can tell there is something Keith isn’t saying.  “You don’t look too excited.  Wasn’t your first choice?”

Keith shakes his head.  “I always figured I wouldn’t go to college.  There’s no way I could afford it on my own, and I could never ask any of my foster families to put up that much money; they haven’t been planning for me for years the way they have their own kids.  But the Shiroganes insisted, so I figure it’s the least I can do to cut back on costs by going to the same place as Shiro, since Altea U has lower tuition rates if someone in your household already goes there.  I managed to get a couple partial scholarships, too, so that helps, and I’ll probably get a part-time job too.  I don’t want to be a financial burden on the Shiroganes.”  He goes quiet for a few moments, seeming to concentrate on the dark cross-hatching he’s drawing in the corner of his notebook.  “What about you?”

“I’m going to Altea U too, actually.”  Hunk smiles.  Keith looks up.

“Really?”  

“Yep.”  Hunk is relieved that graduation won’t be the last he sees Keith.  “Hey, do you have anyone to room with yet?”

“No,” Keith admits.  “I figured I would just choose the random roommate option.  But if you’re looking for someone, would you want to…?”

“That would be awesome!”  Hunk beams, and Keith offers him a relieved smile back before the teacher comes around to rap a pencil on their table and tell them off for not working.  

~~~~~

A few days into summer vacation, Hunk decides to try talking to his soulmate again.  They haven’t spoken since that last time, several months after the 911 incident.  He lifts up the edge of his shirt and writes on his hip with a pen.  「 _ Hello again _ 」 _. _

He doesn’t expect an answer right away -- the likelihood of his soulmate looking there right at that moment was pretty small -- so he sets the pen off to the side and grabs a book to read for a while, glancing down at his hip every time he turns a page.  He reads close to half a chapter by the time a reply shows up.  「 _ Hi _ 」

He writes back.  「 _ How are you doing? _ 」  

He turns back to his book, but only reads one page before he notices a reply.  「 _ Better.  A lot better.  You can write on your hand now, if that’s easier _ 」 __

It would be; he wouldn’t have to twist his torso to read it or write, and he could see the responses faster.  He lays his hand on his desk and writes along the back of it, between the wrist and pinky finger.  「 _ Is this okay? _ 」 __

He watches as more letters appear, stroke by stroke.  「 _ Yeah _ 」  

「 _ So, you’re somewhere safe now? _ 」 __ He asks.

「 _Yeah.  After_ 　」 \-- lines scribble out the word ‘after’, making it illegible -- 「 _For a while, I wasn’t sure if I would be, so thank you for not writing.  But I’m safe now_ 」 

Hunk bites his lip, concerned.  「 _ Can I ask what happened? _ 」

The reply comes a little later, as if the person was giving the matter a lot of thought.  「 _ No.  I’m sorry.  I really don’t want to talk about it _ 」 _. _  There’s a brief pause, then more.  「 _ But things are okay now.  They’re actually… really good _ 」

He smiles at that, relieved.  They’ve filled up all the space on the back of his hand, so he shifts his arm and starts writing along the line of his wrist.  「 _ What’s your name? _ 」 __

The letters come slowly.  「 _ Red _ 」

「 _ Is it really? _ 」 __ He arches an eyebrow at this person he can’t even see.

「 _ … no _ 」 __ They admit, the letters small and seeming to convey a sense of being embarrassed.  「 _ I don’t know how I feel about giving out my name.  Maybe one day _ 」

Hunk nods to himself.  Even though they were soulmates, they didn’t actually know each other very well.  Maybe they could keep talking though, and get to know each other better.  「 _ Okay _ 」, he writes, then puts the black pen down and reaches for the jar of pencils and pens on his desk.  He uncaps a red pen and writes with it.  「 _ Hi, Red _ 」

More lines come, but this time they don’t arrange themselves into letters.  When the person stops, there is a tiny laughing face on his arm.  「 _ What’s your favorite color? _ 」 __ The words appear next to the face.

「 _ Yellow _ 」  He writes.  There is a long pause, and he feels himself starting to get worried.  Did they hate the color yellow for some reason?  But more words appear after several moments.

「 _ I don’t have a yellow pen _ 」  They admit.  「 _ I was looking for one _ 」  

「 _ That’s okay _ 」  He adds a smiley face after the words, though not nearly as detailed as the one his soulmate had drawn.                     

「 _ How old are you? _ 」 __ The person asks.

「 _ Eighteen.  I just graduated a few days ago. _ 」 __ He replies.  「 _ You? _ 」

「 _ Same.  I graduated recently, too _ 」  

They talk like that for a little while, casual questions that reveal bits of their personality rather than concrete details like names or where they live.  Eventually, the person writes, 「 _ I have to go to dinner soon.  Is it okay if I wash these off? _ 」 __

Their conversation has filled up the entirety of Hunk’s forearm, both back and front.  He could imagine that being quite a sight to turn up to dinner with.  「 _ Sure _ .   _ Have a good night _ 」  

「 _ You too _ 」  

~~~~~

The summer passes by in a blur of long, sun-filled days and warm, starry nights.  Hunk and Lance take up their old lifeguard jobs at the community pool, as they have every summer since they were sixteen.  On their days off, they drag Keith and Pidge out of their houses under the assertion that they would turn into vampires unless they got some sun on their skin.  Upon learning that Keith has never learned how to swim, Hunk insists on teaching him; Lance tries to help, but his and Keith’s rivalry over even the smallest things doesn’t make for the best learning environment, and Lance tends to get distracted trying to pry Pidge out of their pool chair by stealing their book or bothering them some other way.  

“ _ Piiiiiidge… _ ” Lance whines dramatically, loosely grabbing onto their ankles under the water and swirling their feet in circles.  

“I don’t know what your problem is.  I did what you asked.”  Pidge tells him, indicating their legs that were dangling in the pool as they sat on the edge.  They were wearing a t-shirt and boardshorts over their one-piece swimsuit, plus a wide-brimmed sunhat, sunglasses, and what was probably half a bottle of SPF-75 slathered over their skin.  You can bring a Pidge to water, but you can’t make them get in.  

“I meant get your whole body in the water, not just your feet!”  Lance pouts.  

“Nah, too cold.”

“It’s like a billion degrees out!”  

“Seeing as how we’re not on the surface of the sun, no, it isn’t.”  Pidge turns a page in their book.  

“Some friend you are.”  Lance rests his chin on their knee.  “You like Gandalf more than me.”

“Of course I do.  Gandalf doesn’t take a bite of my ice cream cone.”  Pidge lightly bats him on the top of the head with their paperback copy of  _ Return of the King _ .  

“I gave you a nickle to help you buy it,” Lance reminds them.  “That was the ice-cream tax!”

Hunk chuckles at them from where he stands a little ways away in the shallower end of the pool.  

“I didn’t know soulmates could argue so much.”  Keith shakes his head in wonder.  Lance and Pidge do bicker quite a bit, since they are both quick-witted and sassy, but not a bit of it is mean-spirited and they are much more likely to jump to each other’s defense than they are to go at each other.  They definitely have their fair share of softer moments, too, like Pidge quietly reminding Lance to take his medication in the afternoon if he forgets to take it at lunch, or Lance instinctively reaching up to grab something for them from a high shelf without them needing to ask, or one of them falling asleep on the other’s shoulder during group movie nights.  Now that it’s summer and they wear sandals more often, Hunk can see that Pidge’s toenails are painted differently every couple of weeks or so, and he knows they aren’t doing them themselves; he would recognize Lance’s handiwork anywhere.  He never sees them hold hands or act like a couple in any way, but there seems to be an intangible bond between them, almost like gravity.

“They’re cute.”  Hunk smiles at his two friends.  

“They’re something, alright.”  Keith watches Lance splash around and grab their legs while pretending to be drowning and Pidge beat him back with their book.

Hunk chuckles and turns back to Keith, holding out his hands.  “Okay, let’s try the whip kick again.”  

Keith makes a face and grumbles, but takes Hunk’s hands to steady himself as he tries to get used to the motions of swimming.

~~~~~

That summer, Hunk starts to have some suspicions about his soulmate.  

It starts on the Fourth of July, when their barefoot soccer game at the fairgrounds before the fireworks results in Keith diving to stop the ball that Lance had delivered a vicious kick to.  The ball had smacked into Keith’s forearm, leaving a stinging red mark.  He had shaken it off and immediately got into a heated argument with Lance about whether or not it had gone over the sweatshirt-marked goal line or not.  

While they bicker over the goal and Pidge wanders off in search of a snack, Hunk looks down and notices a faint red patch of skin on the inside of his forearm.  When he touches his finger to it, it doesn’t hurt at all, and he frowns and looks up to study Keith’s forearm.  He catches a glimpse of the fading red mark in between Keith’s waving motions as he argues.  He’s hesitant to put much stock in it, though; after all, he might have gotten it when Pidge tried to steal the ball from him not by kicking it out from under him, but by proceeding to jump on him and climb him in hope of tripping him (it had not worked in the least, and Hunk had managed to pass the ball to Lance, who had then tried to score on Keith).  

The second time it happens, he’s writing with his soulmate again.  The two of them are locked in a debate about which Star Wars movie is the best, the conversation taking up nearly the entirety of his arm (and they had already filled up and washed off their arm once already!).  Remembering the soccer ball incident, Hunk pulls out his yearbook and opens it up to the inside cover, eyes scanning the flurry of multi-colored messages, drawings, and promises to keep in touch.  He finds the one he’s looking for; thin, cramped letters squished into the top right corner, taking up as little space as possible even though he had been one of the first people to sign it.   _ Hunk, thanks for making sure I didn’t fail calc.  Looking forward to being roommates next year at AU -- Keith.   _ Short and to the point, just like Keith.

Hunk looks down at his arm again, comparing the handwriting.  There are some similarities -- the dot of the i being more of a dash going at the same angle, the way that the t and h were connected, the way that the a was sometimes indistinguishable from an e -- but there are a few differences as well.  Looking down his arm, he notices that his soulmate’s handwriting is a bit on the inconsistent side, usually changing slightly when they are excited or emotional about something.  He notices a line of question marks down near his elbow, along with the words: 「 _ You still there?  Or are you admitting defeat? _ 」

He snorts and takes up his pen again, determined to prove this person wrong about the new series.   

~~~~~

The rest of the summer flies by, and soon it is time to move to Altea University.  Their first weekend is spent mostly moving in, and after their first week of classes, Lance and Pidge invite them over to their apartment, along with Shiro, and Pidge’s brother, Matt, both of whom are RAs in the dorms.  Lance and Matt are alone in their quest to turn the event into a proper college party, and after Shiro stops Matt from providing the underclassmen with liquor, the evening ends up being a chill night of playing video games and chatting about their first week of classes.  

Having been an only child, Hunk had been a little nervous about how it would be to share a room with someone, but it turns out that he and Keith are the perfect roommates for each other.  They generally go to bed around the same time, so one doesn’t have to bother the other with the overhead light being on, and both of them are pretty tidy -- well, Hunk keeps things pretty tidy, and Keith simply doesn’t have a lot of excess belongings lying around, since he didn’t own very many possessions to begin with.  More than that, though, something just seemed to click between them, like they can tell what the other was feeling before they need to say anything.  

More than once, one of them falls asleep while working on homework at their desk, and the other wakes them up with a gentle touch to the back and a soft suggestion to go to bed.  They bring each other back take-out boxes from the dining hall when one of them refuses to leave their desk until they finish their paper, and wind down from exam stress by watching anime episodes together.  Hunk pulls Keith away from chucking his intro to philosophy book at the wall in frustration and Keith pushes Hunk toward his bed while confiscating his essay and insisting “it might not be perfect, but it’s  _ good enough _ , and you haven’t slept in two days…”  They aren’t completely without problems, of course -- Hunk doesn’t understand  _ why  _ Keith feels the need to leave the kitchenette cupboards open after rooting through them, and Keith doesn’t know  _ what _ is so hard about hanging up a towel on the towel rack rather than just leaving it over the curtain rod -- but communication is easy between them and they are able to talk about their problems rather than letting them stew.

If anything, the easy air between them only fuels Hunk’s suspicions.  He wants to bring it up, but he isn’t sure how to broach the topic.  Keith almost never brings up the subject of soulmates himself, unless in reference to something about Pidge and Lance.  He doesn’t seem to have a very positive outlook on soulmates in general, as there is always a hint of disdain or negativity in his tone, as if he feels that the world would be better off without all the drama that comes from being able to leave marks on someone else’s skin.  

Hunk knows that there are downsides to it -- oh god, does he know… even just the memory of seeing those bruises splashed across his skin is enough to make his heart ache -- but he can’t help but see the positive sides of having someone in the world fit perfectly together with you, not completing, just complimenting and supporting.  He’s practically able to see the bond between Lance and Pidge, even though they aren’t the least bit romantic in their relationship.  

One night, Hunk, taking a bathroom break while working on an English project with Lance at his apartment, comes out of the bathroom to find Lance in Pidge’s room, standing behind their desk chair with his hands on their shoulders, thumb rubbing over the skin peeking out of the collar of their shirt.  

“You should change out of your binder,” Lance says quietly.  

“I’m okay.”  Pidge says, leaning back into his hold while propping up their textbook on the desk.  

“Let’s see, you had an eight-AM class this morning, which means you got up at seven-thirty, which was nine hours ago, and I know you didn’t take a break from wearing it because you never do.”  Lance reminds them.  

“It doesn’t even hurt.  I feel fine.”

“That’s because you’re one tough cookie.”  Lance bends down a bit and wraps his arms around their shoulders, resting his cheek against the side of their head.  “But even tough cookies can warp their ribs.”

“Cookies don’t have ribs.”  

“But Pidges do.” Lance says.  “And last time a little Pidge wore their binder more than they should have, you ended up with a rib contusion that you had to have X-rayed to make sure wasn’t broken.  And, may I remind you, the only reason you even went to the ER instead of just ignoring it was because I found a bruise on  _ my  _ ribs.”

“Alright, fine, I’ll change.”  Pidge sighs, one hand coming up to run their fingers through Lance’s hair.  “You should drink some more of that vitamin C stuff; you still sound a little stuffed up from your cold.  Not on an empty stomach, though.”

“Mm, I’ll have some with dinner.”  Lance says.  

“It’s my turn to cook,” Pidge says.  “What do you want tonight?”  

“Hm, surprise me.”  Lance says.  The two of them go quiet, just holding each other like that for a few moments.  There is something startlingly intimate about such a simple scene, and Hunk feels like he is intruding on them just by seeing it, so he quietly retreats to the living room.  

Lance comes out a few minutes later, closing the door behind him.  There is a small, peaceful smile on his lips as he walks over to the couch and resumes his seat next Hunk.  They keep working on their project, and a few minutes later, Pidge emerges from their bedroom wearing an oversized hoodie that Hunk is pretty sure is Lance’s.  They make a beeline for the kitchen to grab a package of mini-muffins before plopping down on Lance’s other side, leaning against him as they look at the laptop between the two boys.  “What’cha working on?”

“English project.”  Lance says, tucking an arm around their shoulders.  They snuggle a bit closer to his side, which surprises Hunk; these two hadn’t acted like this in high school, before they started living together.  Still, the air that they have between them is more like very close friends rather than two people dating.  

“It’s a presentation about a book we read for class about life during the Dutch Hunger Winter.”  Hunk elaborates.

“Sounds thrilling.”  Pidge says flatly.  “Hunk, you staying for dinner?”  

“Nah, I think we should be finishing this up soon.”  Hunk says.  “Anyway, I still have a meal swipe left that I need to use this week.”  

“Are you seriously eating a snack at this hour?”  Lance arches an eyebrow at Pidge.  “You’re not going to be hungry for dinner.”  

“Three measly mini-muffins hardly count as a proper snack,  _ Mom _ .”  Pidge quips, popping another one into their mouth.  

“You could at least eat something healthy, like a banana.”  Lance rolls his eyes.  

“That’s what she said.”  Pidge grins mischievously.  

“How is it that the aro-ace person in our friend group makes the most ‘that’s what she said’ jokes?”  Lance asks, ruffling their hair.  

Pidge snorts and bats his hand away.  “How do you feel about chicken alfredo?  It’s not exciting but we’re running low on ingredients.”  

“Sounds good, and we can go to the grocery store tomorrow after my psych class if you’re free.”  Lance says.  

Pidge hums in agreement and stands up, heading for the kitchen.  

“You guys seem like you’re closer.”  Hunk remarks quietly as he tries to find the most suitable background for a powerpoint about mass famine.  

“I guess we are.”  Lance smiles softly in the direction of the kitchen where Pidge is just out of sight.  

“Are there any… downsides?  To knowing who your soulmate is?”  Hunk asks.  

Lance shrugs.  “Not that I can see.  We got off to a bit of a rocky start, and there are still disagreements and misunderstandings from time to time, but nothing proper communication can’t work out.  But when we’re on the same page, it’s like magic.  That sounds dumb and cliché, but it really is something to just be able to click with someone like that.  It’s reassuring and thrilling and relaxing all at the same time.”  He laces his fingers together behind his head and smiles.  “We don’t have a typical relationship, but what we do have… it’s so easy and comfortable and  _ us _ .  ‘Happy’ doesn’t even begin to describe how I feel about it.”   

Lance’s words stick with Hunk after he leaves the apartment that evening.  He doesn’t have time to dwell on them, because the next day kicks off the start of final exam week, but the words stay in the back of his mind, whispering  _ what if _ ’s between studying and projects.  

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Aw, what a nice, happy chapter. A nice break before Le Big Drama(TM) chapter next.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "And they were ~~roommates~~ soulmates!"  
>  "Oh my god, they were ~~roommates~~ soulmates..."

It’s less than a week after his conversation with Lance and Hunk has just turned nineteen a few days before the next time he sees something from his soulmate.  

It’s Wednesday, which is usually a light day for him, but since it is the end of the semester, he had a final exam that day and two more review sessions for exams that were in the next two days.  He should study more for them, but all he can think as he plods back to his dorm is how much he wants to just take a nap.  He lets out a heavy sigh as he reaches into his pocket to get his room key.  When he sticks the key in the lock and turns his hand to unlock the door, he finds a line of black writing along the inside of his wrist.  Huh.  Was that there, before?  He doesn’t think so; he had just come from an exam, and there was no way the professor would let anyone get away with having anything written on their hand, since they could be cheating.  Either he was getting more forgetful under all this stress, or he hadn’t written it.  

He holds his wrist up and squints at the letters as he shoulders the door open.  That’s definitely his soulmate’s handwriting.  While his own letters are big and blocky and befitting his engineering major, his soulmate’s handwriting tends to be small and cramped, with hardly any space between the letters, as though they were trying to take up as little space as possible.  He frowns and holds his wrist closer as he tries to decipher the writing.  「 _ Fri 10-10:50, Dos Santos Hall 207 _ 」.  What on Earth did  _ that  _ mean?  Was his soulmate telling him to meet them somewhere?  Dos Santos Hall… there was a Dos Santos Hall on Altea U’s campus.  It was the building where a lot of the gen-ed classes were held.  Did his soulmate go to this college too?  How did they know Hunk went here?  He had never mentioned it.  And why would they just say the time and location without a word of “hey, meet me here”?

He’s still mulling over the possibilities when Keith comes back to their room about ten minutes later.  

“Hey,” he calls out, looking up from the exam study guide he’s attempting to read, but he hasn’t been truly paying attention since he started, too busy wondering about the message on his wrist.  

“Sup,” Keith replies, dropping his backpack onto his bed and kicking his shoes off.  He spots the corner of a small spiral notebook poking out from under his bed, having been dropped their earlier.  “There’s that fricking…” he trails off with a sigh, snatching up the day planner.  “My history professor changed the day of our exam and I could not for the life of me find my planner to write it down.  Had to jot it down on the nearest thing I could.”  He grabs a pen and flips to the correct week, writing something down.  At the angle he’s standing, Hunk can see a line of words written in black ink along the inside of his wrist.  He can’t make out what the words say, but he knows regardless.  

Swallowing thickly, he speaks up, afraid this is too good to be true.  “Hey, got any plans for Friday morning?  Around ten?”

“Yeah, have an exam.  This one, actually.”  Keith says, capping the pen.  He slips the planner into his backpack, then turns on the sink that’s in the corner of their room and reaches for the bar of soap as he sticks his hand in the water stream.  Hunk looks down at his own wrist, and sure enough, the letters have started to blur and bleed blueish-gray, as though they had been submerged under running water.  

“Keith,” he says, and he doesn’t know what else to say because his entire world is shifting and clicking into place.  

“Hm?”  Keith looks up, and freezes when he sees Hunk just standing in the center of their dorm room, eyes locked on the inside of his wrist where there is still a smudge of dark ink.  

Hunk raises his eyes to meet Keith’s, and is startled by the fear he finds there.  Suddenly he feels like he’s seven years old again and wondering why his soulmate won’t write to him, he’s ten and his teacher is asking about the handprint-shaped bruise around his forearm, he’s twelve and noticing more and more bruises all over his body, he’s sixteen and frantically dialing 911…

The bar of soap clatters into the sink basin, and suddenly he’s nineteen and looking at the terrified expression on Keith’s face as the realization dawns on him.  

Keith turns the faucet off and sets the bar back on the soap-dish, his hands shaking. “You weren’t supposed to find out.”  The words are so quiet that Hunk can barely hear them.  

“Keith…” Hunk takes a step toward him, but stops when he sees Keith flinch at the movement.  

Keith’s hands tighten around the edge of the sink basin.  “This wasn’t supposed to happen.  You were never supposed to find out.”  He sounds like he’s on the verge of crying, and he still won’t meet Hunk’s eyes.  Something darts across his expression quicker than Hunk can catch, and he bolts for the door.  Hunk acts without thinking, lunging forward to grab Keith by the arm because he  _ can’t leave, not now, please stay _ … He sees Keith’s breath catch in his chest and panic flashes across his face.  “Let go of me!”  His voice is scared and desperate in a way that Hunk has never heard before, and he immediately releases him.  Keith yanks his arm back like he’s been burned and runs out the door, not even stopping for his coat or shoes.  

Hunk stands there for a minute, still stunned, then Keith’s words catch up with him.   _ You were never supposed to find out… _  He didn’t want Hunk to realize he was Keith’s soulmate.  He must have figured it out and said nothing, because he didn’t want him to know.  Something breaks in his chest at the thought of that, and he has to place his hand on the wall to steady himself.  He feels like his heart is being squeezed in an iron grip every time he thinks of what happened to Keith and the fact that he didn’t want Hunk to know they were soulmates.  He wants to cry, he wants to apologize to Keith, he wants to hold him and comfort him, or leave him alone if that’s what Keith wants… no, not that last one.  He wants to  _ want  _ to do that, but he can’t bring himself to.  The thought of living his life alone, of leaving Keith  _ alone _ , is unbearable.  Not after everything he’s been through; Hunk knows he probably doesn’t know even half of it -- only bits and pieces that he has put together like a puzzle that he never wanted to see -- but what he does know is enough to tell him that he needs to be there for Keith, he needs to support him and do what he can to help him heal.  The bruises may have long since faded, but he knows there must be more scars under the surface.  

He runs out of the room, calling out Keith’s name, but his friend is nowhere in sight.  It isn’t until he’s outside and looking around that he realizes he’s too late, he lost him in his moment of hesitation.  He can’t even call him, because he left his phone inside, along with his student ID that unlocks the building.  At least he hadn’t taken his shoes off when he got to his room before.  Rather than wait for someone to come by and let him in, he starts jogging.  Past the classroom buildings, past the student center, all the way to the north edge of campus, and then two blocks more, to where Lance and Pidge’s apartment is.  At least one of them will have a phone with Keith’s number in it.  

~~~~~

Keith hasn’t felt fear like this in years.

When he looks up and sees Hunk staring at his own wrist, and sees the matching black writing on the same place he had written it on his own skin, it takes only half a moment for things to click into place before an icy hand plunges into his gut, dousing him in cold fear.  Suddenly he feels like he is seven years old again and asking his mother about the word that appeared on the back of his hand only to receive an angry slap across his cheek and her dragging him over to the sink to wash it away, he’s nine and a half and has to wear long sleeves to school because there are strange bruises on his arms that his mother says he has to cover up, because she’s sorry and she loves him and it won’t happen again, he’s twelve and it has kept happening over and over again, worse and worse, he’s fourteen and being told to stay quiet, say nothing, tell no one or he’ll regret it, he’s sixteen and his father has a gun and he’s frantically writing on his hip, hoping desperately that someone will see it because he doesn’t know what to do anymore…

The bar of soap clatters noisily into the sink basin and he jumps at the sound as it startles him back to the present.  He’s eighteen and a half and his heart is pounding in his chest and his head is swimming and his mind is screaming.  Hunk’s eyes meet his, and Keith can see that he understands, he  _ knows _ , and everything Keith has worked for comes crashing down around him.  

He tears his eyes away from Hunk, unable to meet his gaze anymore.  His hands shake as he sets the soap back on the soap-dish and turns off the faucet.  “You weren’t supposed to find out…”  His words come out quiet, barely above a whisper.  

“Keith,” Hunk’s voice is soft, like he’s speaking to an injured animal, but it still startles Keith, especially when he takes a step toward him and reaches out his hand.  Keith can’t help but flinch, and suddenly he’s not sure if he’s eight or eighteen anymore.  

He grips the edge of the sink, the porcelain cold against his skin, and uses that to ground himself.  “This wasn’t supposed to happen.  You were never supposed to find out.”  No one was supposed to know about this.  That’s what they always said.  His mom said to hide it from his teachers, his dad said to hide it from his mom… and then later, when the police said it was okay to talk about it, he knew they were wrong,  _ it  _ was wrong, and no one was supposed to know what happened to him.  And it had worked; he had been able to hide his past from his foster families -- “orphaned in a domestic dispute” was the most they were ever told -- but he always knew there was one person he would never be able to face without them knowing, the person who bore twin bruises on their own skin.

He still can’t look at Hunk’s face, can’t bear to see the knowing look or the pity -- or worse, disgust -- that he knows must be there.  His heart is hammering and there are alarms blaring in his head and he does the only thing he can think to do; he runs.  Hunk grabs his arm and something in him snaps, breaks, shatters like reinforced glass; cracked and damaged beyond repair but still not allowed to fall apart.  He’s afraid that if he touches anything -- if anything touches him -- it will be enough to push all the precariously-held pieces out of place.  

“Let go of me!”  The volume of his voice startles even him, and he instantly regrets it.  He’s expecting the hand gripping his arm to tighten, he’s expecting pain, but instead the hand just lets go.  He doesn’t stop to think about why and just bolts out of the room as fast as he can.  

He dodges around a few people in the hallway and nearly vaults down the stairs in his rush to get outside, because the walls are closing in around him and he needs to  _ get out _ …     

The air is cold against the exposed skin of his arms and under the bare soles of his feet, and it helps him come back to himself.  He keeps running, not even knowing where he’s going until his feet take him there.  Where can he go?  Where is safe?   _ Pidge…  _ he thinks to himself, and changes course without slowing down.   _ Pidge and Lance…  _ It’s the only place he can think of.  Pidge had hid from their own soulmate in plain sight for years.  Maybe they would be able to help him do the same.  

He skids to a halt in front of their building and takes the stairs to the second floor two at a time.  He knocks, the rap of his knuckles on the door coming rapid and frantic.  The adrenaline is wearing off and he’s starting to notice how cold he is.  He shivers and wraps his arms around himself as he waits.  He can’t feel his toes, but the soles of his feet feel like they’re on fire.  Pidge opens the door, looking confused.  “Keith?  What… are you okay?”  

“No,” he says, and the words start tumbling out of his mouth before he can stop them.  “He found out, he  _ knows _ , and I can’t… I can’t…” 

Pidge’s brow furrows.  “Wait, who knows what?  Here, come inside,” they hold open the door for him and he enters the apartment.  Lance comes out of his room, eyes widening at the sight of Keith.

“Oh my god, were you mugged or something?”  He asks.  

“No,” Keith shakes his head, and they need to stop asking questions because he can’t answer them.  “I can’t… he knows… he’s not supposed to know and he found out and I can’t--” he cuts himself off, ducking his head and grabbing at his hair as he tries to stop the hysteria that’s bubbling in his chest.  

“Okay, Keith, whatever happened, you’re safe here.”  Pidge says, approaching him cautiously.  “How about we get your feet cleaned up first?  Can we do that?”  

“Feet…?”

“You’re bleeding, Keith.”  Pidge tells him, and he looks down and sees that he is, in fact.  There are a couple of bloody footprints smeared onto the hardwood floor.  He blinks at the sight, feeling like he’s looking at it from someone else’s eyes; his feet are still so cold that he doesn’t really feel the pain.  He must have stepped on glass when he was running here.  Either that, or he’s finally breaking apart, after all these years of being spiderweb-shattered.  

“Keith, can you hear me?”  Pidge asks him.  He looks up at them and nods.  “Okay, let’s go to the bathroom and get your feet cleaned up.  Can I touch you?”   They ask.  He hesitates, then nods again, a little uncertainly; he doesn’t want his friend to get cut by the pieces of himself that are falling apart, but maybe he can hold himself together a little while longer.  Pidge touches his arm carefully and guides him over to the bathroom, touching him as little as possible.  “Okay, how about you sit here, and we’ll wash your feet and take a look at them.  Sound okay?”  

Keith nods wordlessly, sitting on the closed lid of the toilet.  Pidge puts down a dark-green towel under his feet and grabs a first aid kit from the cabinet in the corner.  They ask again before touching his feet, and carefully wash the dirt and flecks of asphalt off with a warm, wet washcloth.  

“These don’t look too bad, actually.”  Pidge tells him.  “There are only a few cuts.  The blood must have been from running on them.”  

“How do you know I ran here?”  He asks.

“Because you showed up out of breath.”  They say simply, reaching for the first aid kit.  “This next part might sting a little, fair warning.”  

His feet are still cold enough that the blood in them feels like it’s on fire anyway, so he hardly notices the sting of the antiseptic as they clean the cuts.  “Aren’t you going to ask what happened?”  He asks, his voice hollow.

“If you want to tell me, I will listen.”  Pidge says.  “But if you don’t want to talk about it, or don’t think you can, I won’t pressure you.”  

“How were you able to hide being soulmates from Lance?”  He blurts out the question.  Pidge’s hands still for a moment, then resume putting bandaids on the bottoms of his feet.  

“Hm, does this have anything to do with you saying ‘he knows’ when you got here?”  Pidge asks thoughtfully.  

Keith nods.  Now that Pidge has finished with his right foot, he draws it close to his body, hugging it to his chest.  The bottom of his foot stings a little where it’s pressed against the lid of the toilet seat.  The pain doesn’t bother him, though.  Pain has always been part of his life.  

“Well,” Pidge says slowly.  “If the other person knows, it’s pretty hard to keep it a secret from them anymore.”

“So I’m screwed.”

“Not necessarily.”  Pidge says, opening another bandaid.  “I can’t really give much more advice without knowing the situation, though.”  

“It’s Hunk.”  Keith says.  Pidge blinks and looks up at him.  He stares at his knee as he goes on, unable to meet their eyes.  “Things happened, really bad things, a long time ago.  And I know he must know, he would have seen.  But I didn’t want him to find out.”  

Before Pidge can reply, a knock comes from the front door.  They hear footsteps cross the apartment and the sound of the door opening, then the hushed murmur of voices.  Keith tenses; that’s Hunk’s voice.  Pidge lays a bandaid over the last cut, smoothing it down with their thumbs.

“Hey,” Pidge touches his ankle, drawing his attention back to them.  “We’re right here.  You’re gonna be okay.”  

He takes a deep breath and nods, standing up.

~~~~~

Running has never really been Hunk’s strong point, but he manages to make it to Lance and Pidge’s apartment, albeit winded.  He climbs the stairs to the second floor and knocks on their door, still trying to catch his breath.  Lance opens the door, looking uncharacteristically angry.

“What happened?”  He asks, crossing his arms and planting himself in the middle of the doorway.  Hunk blinks.  

“Wh… what?”  Hunk stares at him.  “Why would you…?  Wait, is Keith here?”  

“Before I tell you if he’s here or not, I need to know if you did anything to hurt him.”  Lance says.  

Hunk’s heart, having just started to calm down from running, starts pounding frantically again.  “He’s hurt?”  When he gets no response from Lance, he shakes his head.  “No, I didn’t… I didn’t hurt him, or at least I didn’t mean to.  I don’t really know what happened.  We found out we were soulmates and he just… panicked, I think.”  His voice gets quiet.  “I think he doesn’t want me as a soulmate.”  

Lance frowns.  “ _ I  _ think you two have some talking you need to do.”  He says, opening the door wider.  Hunk steps inside and looks around, but doesn’t see Keith.  Lance stoops down and picks up a wad of paper towels on the floor, and Hunk catches sight of a flash of red on them before they are thrown away.   _ Blood… _

“Is he hurt?”  Hunk asks again.  

Lance sighs, rubbing the back of his neck.  “I don’t really know.  He showed up about ten minutes before you did, freaked out.  Pidge is with him.”

As if on cue, the bathroom door opens and Keith steps out, rubbing his arm self-consciously.  He steps gingerly, trying not to put too much weight on his feet.  Hunk can see the edges of bandaids on the bottoms of his feet, the skin of which looks red from the cold.  His shoulders are hunched, like a cornered animal.  His eyes meet Hunk’s for a moment, then he looks away.

“Keith,” Hunk starts.  “I’m… I’m sorry.  I don’t know what I did to make you afraid, and I know you don’t want me to be your soulmate, but… I’m sorry.”

Keith looks up, puzzled.  “It wasn’t anything you did.  I should be the one apologizing.  And why… why would you think I don’t want you as a soulmate?”

“Because… you ran away?”  Hunk says, a little uncertain now.

“You thought I…?  Oh.”  Keith shakes his head.  “No.  No, it wasn’t you.  I--” he cuts off, glancing nervously at Lance and Pidge, who are watching the two of them carefully.  

Lance’s eyes flick between them, gears turning in his head.  “You know what, I think you two need to sit down and have a conversation about whatever is going on.”  He grabs his and Pidge’s jackets off the coat rack by the door.  “We’ll go, and you guys can have some privacy to talk this thing out.”  

“Don’t you think we should stay, just in case?”  Pidge asks him quietly.

“Nope.  What they need is privacy and communication.”  Lance tells Pidge, then points sternly at the other two.  “You guys are not to leave this house until you talk this out.  Understand?  Now, we are going to walk to McDonald’s, and we’ll check back here in about twenty minutes.  If you need more time, we’ll leave again.  I’m locking the door, so no going anywhere until you talk, got it?”  He takes Pidge’s hand.

“I don’t know if this is really the best method…” Pidge says as he walks them out the door.

“It’ll work.  Come on, I’ll buy you a McFlurry.”  Lance tells them, locking the door behind him.  

“You know that door unlocks from the inside, right?”  Pidge tells him, voice coming through the door.

“It’s the principle of the thing, Pidge.”  Lance’s voice says, then their footsteps fade away.  

Still a little perplexed by this turn of events, Hunk turns back to Keith, who is hovering in the doorway of the bathroom.  “Are you okay?”  He asks quietly, remembering the blood-stained paper towels Lance had thrown away.  

Keith lifts one shoulder in a half-shrug.  “I guess I stepped in some glass on my way over here.  Pidge patched me up, though.”  

Hunk swallows thickly, hating the thought of Keith being hurt in any way.  “You should sit down, then.  Take the weight off your feet.”  

“It doesn’t hurt that bad.”  Keith says, but he takes a few steps gingerly to sit on the end of the couch, hugging his knees to his chest.  Hunk sits down on the other end, thinking Keith might want some space even though all he wants to do is hold him.  Keith is quiet for several long moments before he starts speaking.  “My dad lost his job when I was little.  He started drinking a lot, and hitting my mom.  Me too, sometimes, but mostly her.  They were soulmates, so they had that link.  He got whatever bruises he gave her, so he blamed her for them, as if it were her fault.  When I found writing on my hand, I asked her about it, and she slapped me across the face.  That was the first time she hit me.  She washed the ink off and told me that I was never to talk to my soulmate and never to tell my dad.  She believed nothing good could come from soulmates.  Every time I found more words on my hand, I had to wash them off before either of them could see.”

A horrible feeling of guilt twists in Hunk’s gut.  He remembers that day.  He remembers his mother asking why his cheek was red, and seeing the letters get washed off of his hand.  He remembers writing over and over again, desperate for a response and never realizing that every time he wrote, he was putting his soulmate in danger.  “I’m so sorry--”

“It’s okay,” Keith says.  “You didn’t know.  At the time, I was upset about it; I didn’t know why this person kept writing to me, why they wouldn’t stop.  It was only much, much later that I learned that soulmates weren’t supposed to be a bad thing, so of course you would keep trying.”  He sighs and rests his chin on top of his knees.  “Things kind of cycled between okay and really bad, after that.  Sometimes he would keep a job for a while, only to lose it a few months or a year later.  All I could do was try to stay out of their way and not make either of them mad, but sometimes… sometimes it didn’t matter.  Sometimes they would take it out on me and there was nothing I could do.  Sometimes it wasn’t even my fault.”  He looked down.  “He caught her cheating on him.  Said he was going to kill her if she did it again.  She got mad and left.  He was angry, and he…” he breaks off suddenly, pressing his lips to his knee for a few moments.  When he next speaks up, it’s barely above a whisper.  “I don’t want to say what he did, that night.  I was fourteen.”  

Hunk remembers being fourteen and finding bruises on his hips.  He swallows hard, feeling sick to his stomach.  “It’s okay.  You don’t have to talk about it.”  

Keith’s expression closes like a shutter being drawn over a window and he leans his forehead against his knees.  “So you already knew.”  He says, his voice miserable.  It isn’t a question.

“I… guessed.”  Hunk admits.  “I didn’t want to be right.”  

“I didn’t want you to find out.  The rest of it, too, but mostly that part.”  Keith says quietly.  “I didn’t… I couldn’t do anything…”

“I know.”  Hunk says.  “It wasn’t your fault.”  He hesitates, then carefully moves closer, his hand hovering between them.  “Can I…?”

Keith nods, and Hunk lays a hand on his shoulder, uncertain how much he would be comfortable with.  He rubs his thumb over the skin at the edge of his t-shirt collar, and can feel and visibly see some of the tension bleed out of Keith at the action.

Keith takes a deep breath and goes on.  “She came back, a few days later.  Things were tense for another couple of years, and then, the day I turned sixteen, he found out she was cheating again.  He left and came back that night with a gun.  I was doing my homework in my room when they started screaming at each other.  I hid in the closet.  I didn’t know what to do and I was scared, I was terrified that they would remember I was home and try to drag me into whatever they were fighting about this time.  I knew he had a gun; I saw him through the window when he came home.  There was a pen on the floor of the closet, and I used it to write the message on my hip about 911.  I heard a gunshot, and then… then it was just him screaming.  Yelling at her that it was all her fault.  I don’t know how long I sat there without moving, it felt like an eternity.  Then I heard police sirens, and he must have heard them too.  There was another gunshot, and then silence until the police showed up.  I still couldn’t make myself move.  They used a K-9 unit to find me, actually.  Thought I had already been killed and hidden somewhere, so they were pretty surprised to find me alive.”  He sighs, and Hunk is taken aback by just how  _ tired _ he looks.  Without even thinking, he starts rubbing his back, his hand moving in slow, soothing circles along the back of his shoulders.  Keith leans in a bit closer, so Hunk slides his arm around his shoulders, palm rubbing the opposite arm.  

“I went into foster care, after they released me from the hospital.”  Keith says, going on.  “I had a broken arm and a couple of broken ribs from before I hid.  Plus they had to make sure I was mentally stable and stuff.  Got sent around to a bunch of different families.  Some were okay, some weren’t great, crowded with too many broken kids.  But at least no one was trying to kill me anymore.”  

“Always a plus.”  Hunk acknowledges.  Keith chuckles dryly.

“I don’t remember how many foster families I got passed around to before I ended up with the Shiroganes.”  Keith says.  “Dr. Shirogane -- Takashi’s mom -- she’s a psychologist, and she thinks I spent a lot of time disassociating, which is why I don’t remember a whole lot from that time.  But they were able to get me help, and they were really great, and I finally started feeling… better.  Not completely, but… better than before.  A lot better.  Probably helped that I actually managed to make friends, too.”  He gives Hunk a look out of the side of his eyes, lips lifting in a small smile.    “I don’t think I would be here if it wasn’t for you and Pidge and Lance.”  

Hunk smiles sadly and gives his shoulders a little squeeze.

“So, there you go.”  Keith says, looking down again.  “There’s my whole sob story.  That’s… that’s what I didn’t want you to find out.  I didn’t know you were my soulmate before today.  I just… I’ve spent my whole life trying to hide things -- the bruises, everything that happened… -- and trying to build up this facade that I’m okay, trying to fool everyone and hoping I can maybe fool myself too.  So I told myself that I never wanted to meet my soulmate, because they’re the only person alive who knows about what happened to me, or at least who saw the effects.  I knew I wouldn’t be able to face them, knowing that they knew.”  He pauses, then goes on, his voice quieter.  “I was afraid… of how you would see me, knowing that.”  

Hunk shakes his head.  “I think you’re the strongest person I’ve ever met, Keith.”  

Keith barks out a laugh, short and humorless.  “I’m not.  I never stood up to either of them, I didn’t stop them.  I’m not strong, not at all.”

“You are.”  Hunk says.

“I… I’m not--” Keith cuts himself off, covering his eyes with his hand and biting his lip.  Hunk rubs his arm as his shoulders start to shake.  

“You are strong.”  Hunk tells him again, quiet and firm.  Keith turns and throws his arms around his neck, pressing closer, and Hunk gently shifts them until Keith is on his lap and he can wrap his arms around him properly.  His heart aches and it’s all he can do to just hold Keith as he cries, murmuring reassurances in his ear and rubbing his back.  He loses track of how much time passes; it feels like he and Keith are just in their own little world.

When Keith finally calms down again, both of them are quiet for a few minutes.  Keith lets out a heavy, shaky sigh.  “I feel… really, really tired.”  

“I’d imagine having a panic attack, running a mile in the cold, verbally reliving years of trauma, and then having a good long cry can do that to a person.”  Hunk says gently, rubbing circles between his shoulder blades.  

“Hmm,” Keith hums in agreement, his eyes falling closed.  There’s a small smile on his lips, though.  

“Wanna take a nap?”  Hunk asks.  

“Won’t Pidge and Lance be back soon?”  Keith asks, not opening his eyes.  Hunk glances at the clock on the wall.  

“They said they’d be gone twenty minutes and I think it’s been close to an hour.”  Hunk says.  “Who knows when they’ll be back.”

“Mm.”  

Hunk can tell that Keith isn’t fully awake.  He shifts them into a slightly more comfortable position, then brushes his fingers through Keith’s hair.  “Get some rest.  I’ve got you.”  

They’ve only been sitting like that for about five minutes before Hunk notices movement by the window.  He looks up to see Lance peeking in through the bottom corner of the window, eyes widening when he realizes Hunk has spotted him.  He holds up a thumbs-up and raises an eyebrow questioningly.  Hunk rolls his eyes and nods.  Lance turns and beckons wildly, and the top of Pidge’s head peeks in through the window a few moments later.  Hunk wonders absently how many times they have done that in the past hour.  The two of them stand up and there’s a metallic click as they unlock the door.  He hears Pidge mutter “hurry up, I’m cold...” and Lance reply “well if you didn’t try to eat your ice cream on the walk back…” before the door opens.  

“Hey, everything okay now?”  Lance asks, stepping inside.  

“I think so.”  Hunk says, looking down at Keith’s sleeping face.  He looks up.  “Where did you guys go?”  

“Macdo’.”  Pidge replies, lifting up their Reese’s McFlurry as if in toast.  Lance rolls his eyes and takes their coat to hang it up alongside his on the coat rack.

“You are the only person who calls it that.”

“The entire Kansai region of Japan begs to differ.”  Pidge says, dropping into a green folding dorm chair in the corner.  

“You are such a  _ weeb _ …” Lance ruffles their hair as he passes them on his way to the kitchen.  

“Anyway, we checked in the window real quick when we got back and you still seemed, uh, occupied, so we walked to the park and back too.”  Pidge explains.  “Also we brought you cookies.”  They rummage around in the McDonald’s bag in their lap and pull out two packaged chocolate chip cookies.

“Aw, thanks, you guys.”  Hunk smiles.  Pidge tugs on Lance’s sleeve as he passes by, holding the cookies out.  

“Do I look like a carrier pigeon to you?”  Lance cocks an eyebrow at them.  Pidge grabs his hand and kisses the back of his knuckles, then pushes the cookie packages into his palm.  Lance shrugs, smiling.  “Can’t argue with that.”  He walks the cookies over to Hunk and sets them on the coffee table next to Hunk’s feet, along with a glass of water.  “For sleeping beauty, when he wakes up.”  

“‘M not sleeping beauty…” Keith mutters.  

“Fine, sleeping grouchy, whatever floats your boat.”  Lance rolls his eyes, walking away.  He leans against the wall next to Pidge’s chair.  “So you guys have a good talk?  Get everything figured out?”

“Yeah.”  Hunk smiles down at Keith, who still hasn’t opened his eyes.  Keith hums in agreement.  

Lance’s eyes flick between the two of them, and he opens his mouth to say something but Pidge kicks him in the knee.  “Not our business.”  They tell him.

“But I just--”

“Not. Our. Business.”  Pidge repeats firmly.  Lance grumbles but doesn’t push the matter, which both Hunk and Keith are grateful for.     

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading this fic, and thank you for all the lovely comments! I'm glad you enjoyed reading this.

**Author's Note:**

> I've also got a [ tumblr](http://gold-leeaf.tumblr.com/), if you want to see me scream about voltron and some other things.


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